Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Senator Minihan is very charitable.

I never in my entire life set out to get blind drunk; I had no interest in it. I claim no virtue, but circumstances caused things to happen. However, it seems to me that there is now a peculiar value system among some young people in society — I say that not judgmentally but with concern — that necessitates such self-destructive behaviour. The tragic consequence is that, if one drinks to that extent, the following day one will feel depression on a level that one could never have imagined, since that is one of the consequences. If one has self-destructive impulses, one has that consequence too. In Ireland we can never separate alcohol from part of our problem with suicide. It is not the only one, and it is too dramatic a statement on the part of some of the crusaders on alcohol to say that if we could restrict it, this would have a dramatic impact on suicide. It probably would impact on some young suicides.

However, some of it is a consequence of the extraordinary social changes that have happened. Some aspects not often addressed in this debate concern me profoundly. I know that Senator Cox has mentioned on a few occasions before Christmas the degree to which commercial forces target young people when they are at their most vulnerable, between 12 and 17 or 18 years, and use subliminal — or, increasingly, less than subliminal — messages of sex and personal and emotional security. At a time when people are most vulnerable, sophisticated marketing schemes exploit those insecurities. It is bad enough that they are used for commercial purposes, but it is worse when they are calculated to make people more aware of their own inadequacies.

One of the many problems of politics is that we can never admit to our own inadequacies. Publicly, the Minister of State must say that he is the best Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children the country has ever seen. Publicly, I must say that he is not.